


The End of the Line

by Lafayette1777



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: But also prequel fic, Future Fic, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, World War II, angsty af because of course, god they're so in love, this fucking movie, very brief mentions of racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 12:52:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11714766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: Collins and Farrier in the beginning, the before, and the after.





	The End of the Line

**Author's Note:**

> many wikipedia articles later, i finished this at 4 am because i am clearly a person who makes healthy choices. also, i reference atonement in here pretty obviously, because why not have two sad dunkirk movies for the price of one. 
> 
> thanks for reading!!!

He thinks, often, that the world should be more different with Farrier gone, but it’s not. The Luftwaffe still chases him across the great blue beyond. He still writes his mother letters with the occasional humorous anecdote about life on base. He still dreams of drowning, of water rushing down his windpipe to choke the engine of his heart under a clear, hot sun. 

The changes are minute, in the grand scheme. He eats alone; someone with a new callsign screams along at his wingtip. No firm hand grips his shoulder, steers him out of the crowd just as the day is winding to a close, breathing warmth into his ear. 

And London burns and crumbles, regardless of the RAF’s—of Collins’s—best efforts. 

They’re calling it the Blitz. Collins doesn’t really have a grip on it, not from the air, where every night mission is possessed by an insidiously dark haze, punctuated only by the whine of Ju-88s and Stukas and the muffled rumble of distant explosions, like thunder rolling in off the sea. He doesn’t go into town, doesn’t have much family in the south. He thinks Farrier might, though, if his accent is any indication, but Collins always suspected that it might be an affectation, a defense mechanism. Regardless of the crisp edge to his syllables, something about Farrier never quite lined up with the city. 

Farrier had always gone to great lengths to conceal himself beneath layers of something vaguely fatalistic, and perhaps that was a defense mechanism too. They were men without a future, especially when they were together. Might as well be without a past, too. 

And Collins, for all he understood such a notion, had never quite been able to subscribe to it. Not then, anyway.

Yes, things are different. Minutely, but surely. In his dreams, the screech of his own Spitfire is indistinguishable from the grind of a Messerschmitt arcing invisibly behind him. The sourceless, sharp staccato of machine gun fire slices through his eardrums. And he drowns, he always drowns. In darkness, in fire, in water the color of Farrier’s eyes. 

 

 

_They meet because Farrier is on fire._

_The Hurricane’s engine is a flaming, shredded mess by the time it glides to a halt on the airstrip. Collins watches, head cocked curiously, while a dark shadow rises out of the undulating heat, sliding out of the blackened canopy with an inelegant thud onto the tarmac._

_Collins is young. Maybe this is just how it always is, he thinks. He’s been in the RAF for all of three months—left the earthen, frosty north for a slightly less frosty Kent. “Hey, mate,” he calls to the pilot. “You’ve got a wee bit—”_

_Farrier can’t quite reach the shimmering ember on his shoulder, so Collins pats it out for him._

_“Thanks,” is the grunted reply, but then Farrier turns to look him in the eye, and he pauses. They both do. Somewhere behind him, the plane burns, but Collins sees only the man in front of him._

_“Collins,” says Collins._

_“Farrier,” says Farrier._

_They don’t shake hands. Collins’s hand is still on the other man’s shoulder, smothering flames that have long gone cold and yet, still, his palm is peculiarly warm. Their eyes are locked together; Collins, distantly, feels some part of him fall away, the vague sense of the earth crumbling beneath his feet._

_He is exposed, precarious, kept together only by his grip on Farrier’s coat._

_His hand slides across the plain of Farrier’s back, coming to a rest between his shoulder blades, where his heart beat reverberates through Collins’s arm until it synchronizes with his own._

_For a long moment, neither of them moves._

_“Do you think they can salvage the bird?” Farrier asks, with a jerk of his head back toward the plane. They’re upwind of the billowing black smoke. It’s an absurd question. He can see the structural struts where the skin of the fuselage has burned away; the tires on the landing gear are a midnight shaped puddle._

_Collins looks back to find Farrier smirking at him._

_“She just needs a new coat of paint,” replies Collins._

_When Farrier laughs, his eyes fold, his lips pull back over imperfect teeth, and Collins sort of feels like he’s in free fall—euphoria and fear all at once, plunging toward the icy waves below._

 

 

At some point, Collins realizes, with some measure of alarm, that he’s become one of the old dogs in his squadron. He can measure his survival in years, rather than seconds. He’s a little tattered, a little singed, as is his plane, but he’s still here. Rather remarkably, given the state of things. Sometimes, he plots a course back to base only to find the landing field aflame, the hangars rubble. 

His capacity for panic seems to have withered. It feels like less of a triumph than it probably should.

The younger boys ask him things, and he knows the answers. Sometimes he steps out of a cockpit and feels reverent, youthful eyes on the back of his neck. There’s something both familiar and foreign about it. 

The longer he survives, though, the more he thinks that he should be making plans for his death. It’s different for pilots than for other soldiers, he imagines. He doesn’t picture many scenarios wherein they recover his body, so whatever he leaves behind will need to be tucked under the pillow of his bunk if it is to make it home. 

It was Farrier who taught him this, of course. By example rather than in words. On base, he wore the thin silver chain of a St Christopher medal around his neck. Before a mission, Collins would watch as he carefully pulled it over his ears and curled it around one finger before depositing it in the sole of his extra boots. It was there that Collins had found it the day after his lonely return from Dunkirk, and it’s been around his own neck ever since. 

He waits for an empty moment, then pulls out the nub of a pencil and the empty back of crinkled map. He tries to think of something to say to his mum, something that will put her at ease, or perhaps something for his sister Moira, currently stationed out in the wilds of the North Sea, floating in the poisonous, immemorial vortex of a hospital ship. She would understand without a word, and his mum won’t ever understand regardless of how much he might say. 

Instead he writes _Farrier_ , first, then scratches it out. 

Then, beneath that:

_Sam._

 

 

_Collins has never really got the hang of living in the present. He gets too many letters from home, too many reminders of what he’s left behind. And the other boys never let him forget where he comes from anyways, not with the way he bends his vowels. Sometimes, if he thinks about it, he wonders what exactly it is that Farrier is running from, or running to, that has him forsaking all but the moment he exists inside of in any given second._

_“Sam, what are you gonna do after the war?” Collins asks, still pink cheeked and gasping. Early spring grass tickles his cheek when he turns his head to look at Farrier, to watch the sweat cool across his exposed skin._

_“S’pose I’ll go back to what I did before,” he replies, with a breathless shrug. He worked with his father, repairing leather goods, he once told Collins, voice betraying nothing—no pride or shame, no enthusiasm or apathy. The past is a void, a collection of mostly useless facts that have no bearing on fuel gauges, on machine gun bullets, on burning or on drowning._

_“Won’t you be bored of it, after all this?” Collins makes a point of averting his eyes, letting his gaze settle on where their legs are still intertwined beneath the shade of the elm. He’s not sure, entirely, what he’s asking._

_Farrier shimmies back toward him across the ground, distracts him with a kiss that pulls at the remnants of the heat shared a few minutes before. Farrier’s warm hand is in the ginger hair at the base of his neck, their heartbeats meshing together like woven threads._

_The slide of skin against skin seems to be saying all that is going unsaid._

 

 

The years drag on—England takes a beating, and Collins does too. He spends a month staring at the ceiling of a field hospital while the swelling goes down on a burn on his shoulder before managing to wiggle his way back into the air. Not long after, they take heavy fire over the Channel; he pulls his chute at the last moment but still hits the water hard, snapping his left arm on impact. The other two in his squadron aren’t so lucky—over the swells, he catches a glimpse of the cacophony of light and sound as their planes nosedive in quick succession, and the strange silence in the aftermath as the remnants sink into the dark, roiling void. 

The ocean always covers its shame; today, Collins is the only witness.

He gets picked up after a few hours by the _Penylan_ , only to be sunk by an E-boat before the medic on board can even set his arm. He makes a break for the railing and throws himself overboard before the ship even begins to list—intuitively, he knows he’d rather greet the water than have it greet him. By the time he’s back on land again, in the care of those that are equipped with more than a makeshift splint and a bottle of whiskey, the arm has healed wrong, but not horrifically. He ignores the pain, tells his superior that a crooked arm really isn’t anything to sneeze about, and ends up back on base by the time the end of the month is closing in. The blank side of the map, the stubby pencil, the St. Christopher medal, are all where he left them. 

Later, someone tells him it’s Christmas. 

More time passes, in fits and stops. Over Belgium, a Messerschmitt shreds the starboard side of his aircraft, taking out half his gauges and leaving him bleeding all over his uniform, the yoke, the meager upholstery of his seat. He sets the bird on the ground just as his vision is starting to go black around the edges. It takes his entire ground crew and a nurse to drag him out of the cockpit, to get his fingers to release the controls. At some point in the commotion, he drowns in the darkness waiting in the periphery. 

When he wakes up, the war is over.

 

 

_Collins is already blind with rage by the time he gets the canopy open. One flying leap and he’s down on the tarmac, dodging wings and propellers, boots slapping the earth as if it, too, is unforgivable. Farrier slides down to the ground just as Collins pulls back his right fist, but instead of landing a blow all he does is shove Farrier up against the fuselage and growl in his face._

_“You can’t fucking do that!”_

_“I can do whatever the hell I please,” Farrier spits back, eyes burning. He gives Collins a weak push, but Collins has a grip on his collar, now, and a shaking fist raised again. An empty, vaguely pathetic threat. Farrier’s hot breath clouds his senses._

_“Alright, break it up, boys,” Fortis Leader calls. Collins hesitates a beat, still slurring insults in Gaelic and English, eyes prickling hot and wet. Finally, he relinquishes his grip, catching sight of the bloody gash in Farrier’s coat, over his left shoulder. There’s a bullet hole in the canopy above them to match. Collins backs away, face burning with anger, with fear._

_“I saved your bloody life,” Farrier snarls at him._

_“Didn’t need saving,” Collins retorts. All his organs feel crowded into his throat, constricting his breath. He blinks, long and hard, and behind his eyelids sees only Farrier’s sudden dive, the Messerschmitt’s hail of bullets, the sound of his own beating heart blocking out all else._

_By now, their squadron leader is standing between them, eyeing them both with withering disapproval. “We all came back alive. There’s no need to drag things out.” He frowns. “Collins, keep your eyes open up there. Farrier, keep the theatrics to a minimum. We’re all professionals, are we not?”_

_Collins does not trust his voice. He turns on his heel._

_It takes a sunset and a few cigarettes for Collins to clear his head, to get the shake out of his hands and the red from his vision. He sits under their favorite elm, out of sight, until the coolness of the earth seeps into his bones. Until the reality of the war begins to melt away into the unreality of life on base, life spent waiting, life lived in the present and not the past. He breathes smoke, in and out, until he can’t feel the water rushing in anymore._

_He finds Farrier in the empty barracks, shining his shoes meticulously, a fresh bandage over his deltoid. For a long time, neither of them says anything. The air is soft, empty of all sound but the muffled creak of leather._

_Then Collins settles next to him on Farrier’s bottom bunk and pulls a picture out of his breast pocket. It’s a whitewashed cottage on a green cliff, overlooking a windswept sea._

_“It’s me Nan’s place,” he says quietly. “In St. Andrews. She lives with me aunt, now, so it’s empty.”_

_Farrier looks up from the photo and meets his eyes._

_“It’s beautiful,” Collins says quietly. “Secluded.”_

_“What are you saying?” Farrier asks, after a beat._

_Collins shrugs. “S’not much, but it’s something. Something past tomorrow.”_

_The door opens; Fortis Leader is marching in, telling them they’re headed for Dunkirk in the morning, and somewhere in the briefing the picture slips from Collins’s hand into Farrier’s, and then into the breast pocket of his coat, closest to his heart._

 

 

They hand him a train ticket, and he gets lost for a while, slipping in and out of his own self with each train connection. He drops back into the known universe when he finds himself at his mother’s house, tucked into his childhood bed, dragging himself out of dreams of water and fire and life and death. The St. Christopher medal around his neck gets tangled in the sheets. He raids the liquor cabinet and goes back to bed while his mother makes quiet, worried phone calls on the other side of his bedroom door. 

Sometimes, he thinks about prisoners-of-war. About the odds of surviving five years with the enemy. About the last time he saw Farrier, arcing gracefully over the beach at Dunkirk. In his element. Free. 

Alive. 

The war is over; information from behind the former enemy lines is streaming in. He blinds himself to all of it, prevents himself from becoming ensnared by the treacherous reach of hope. The most likely outcome of Farrier’s capture is not one that he can confront. So he doesn’t. 

Instead, he fixes his mother’s furnace, and the neighbor’s tractor, and his cousin’s hunting rifle until his arm begins to ache. In between, he drinks, and lies curled beneath the blankets. Behind his eyelids is a green, wind-battered cliff, and a white cottage far above the crushing weight of the waves. 

Moira’s ship went down off the coast of Denmark, his mother tells him, but she made it off with a handful of others. She ambled back to England, went briefly insane from the stress, then got back to work in a London hospital, where she met a British Indian doctor and fell in love. They were married while Collins was floating in the wreckage of the _Penylan_. His mother isn’t speaking to her anymore because of her choice of husband, and Collins, naturally, is expected to pick a side for the rest of their natural lifetimes. He puts off the decision, knowing that when he inevitably sides with Moira he’ll probably have to leave his bed. 

He sits down at the roll top desk to write Moira a letter one afternoon, with the intention of giving his congratulations and assuring her that mother will probably get over herself before they’re all dead. 

Instead, he writes: _I lost my heart somewhere in the sky over Dunkirk._

Anything else he might have said is lost, too; the pencil snaps in his too-tight grip. 

 

 

_The morning before they leave for Dunkirk, the sun rises pink on the horizon, and Collins smokes half a cigarette before passing it off to Farrier to finish. Farrier wants to say something, Collins can sense it—something about yesterday’s close call, maybe, or the day ahead—but it’s a long while before the silence breaks._

_Farrier pulls back his coat to expose the photo of the cliffs, tucked in securely beneath his lifejacket. He taps the postcard sized picture. “All I know about the future, about anything—” he starts, voice quiet and gruff. He gives his head a brisk shake, as though untangling his tongue manually. “All I want is for it to be me and you, in the end.”_

_Collins lets out a long breath, and smiles. “Me too.”_

_When the cigarette burns down to nothing, Farrier grinds it into the dirt with the steel toe of his boot. He squeezes Collins’s shoulder for the briefest of seconds, meets his eyes._

_Then he’s turning toward the shimmering runway, toward fate, toward the sea beyond._

_And, of course, Collins follows._

 

 

His sister invites him to London to meet her husband, to get out of the house for a bit, to pull him out of the fog she seems to be able to sense from five hundred miles away. He arrives earlier than he expects and finds himself in the first pub he sees outside of the train station. And, for a moment it feels like no time has passed at all, even though he’s dressed in a turtleneck instead of his wings. Servicemen are still returning from the front in waves; an unholy number are packed into this bar alone. Collins fights his way up to order a pint and settles into a corner seat with a view of the wood-paneled wall. A day old paper graces the bar in front of him; he latches onto it until his eyes glaze over. 

“Ainsley.”

The voice is so quiet that it may as well come from inside his own head. He lifts his gaze, turns slowly away from the wall and back in the direction of the herd of boys. One of them is not a boy, but a man—a thin one, with deep smoke-colored circles beneath his eyes and a new scar carving through his upper lip. He knows those lips. 

“Ainsley Collins,” the man says again, something like disbelief marring his tone.

“Aye,” says Collins. 

Suddenly, he can’t breathe.

Then he’s off the chair and they’re meeting in the middle, arms tight around each other, crushing the breath out of each other’s lungs. Collins lets out a hysterical laugh into Farrier’s boney shoulder, feeling himself come unraveled in the other man’s grip. He waits to wake up, waits to realize that he’s come unmoored from reality and that the man beneath his hands is a cruel mirage. 

But the wake up doesn’t come; the veil doesn’t lift. He buries himself in Farrier’s collar for another moment and then pulls back to look him in the face, in the eyes. Farrier doesn’t even break the gaze when he reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a piece of creased cardstock—a photo, Collins realizes, folded many times over to fit into socks or waistbands or collars, kept just out of sight. 

Collins looks down at the familiar green cliff, the cottage perched on the edge of oblivion.

The future unfolds before them.

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com


End file.
